Google partners with the Barbican to show coders are artists

Coders are inherently creative and don't need to be partnered with art directors and copywriters, said Google Creative Lab's Steve Vranakis at a digital art exhibition at the Barbican last night.

Varvara Guljajeva and Mar Canet's Wishing Wall

Karsten Schmidt's Co(de)factory

DevArt installation room

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Vranakis, the executive creative director at Google Creative Lab, was speaking at a private viewing of Google’s DevArt exhibition at the Barbican Centre. For the show, Google commissioned artists to create installations using technology and code.

Vranakis said: The whole idea was to show how coding can be a creative inspiration. It’s been going on now for a while, we just wanted to acknowledge it – code is a creative discipline,"

Google commissioned three installations for the show.

Zach Lieberman’s Play the World, is a keyboard that takes notes in real-time from internet radio stations across the world whenever a key is struck.

Varvara Guljajeva and Mar Canet created Wishing Wall, which invites people to whisper wishes into a receiver and then turns that wish into the image of a butterfly on a screen.

Karsten Schmidt produced an installation called Co(de)factory, which used a 3D printer that allows people to collaborate to make physical artefacts.

The French duo Cyril Diagne and Béatrice Lartigue also appeared in the show with their project, Les Métamorphoses de Mr. Kalia – which uses skeleton-tracking technology – after winning a competition.